Water and Grasshoppers

  While it's a wonder as to how employees at the food court at Gulf City have been able to wash their hands over the last month with 'no water' being the mantra and with my last memory of rain being clouded in dust, I can't say that I'm very surprised that WASA is tightening water usage. As I scrubbed a wall yesterday, I thought how much easier it would be to use the pressure washer and get it all done within a few moments. It's a small wall. It's a lot of scrubbing. And, really, it's quite possible that I drank as much water while scrubbing as I would have used on the wall with a pressure washer.

But then I remembered the many vehicles I saw yesterday driving around with empty water tanks, destinations unknown. The whole water shortage business is rather bothersome when you consider that it had to get to this degree for WASA to start fixing its own leaky pipes. But they are fixing them. It's easy to damn (not dam) them for the decades of leaky services, but they are finally doing something and as such I feel the need to encourage them.

In South Oropouche, I see drying ponds. One farmer adjacent my own area ran out of water last year and asked permission to use the water from one of my ponds. That pond is almost completely dry now. Sunday I'll probably take some photos for a follow up - but the point is that the ponds for food produce are drying. Larger ponds survive, though it is only a matter of time should the sky continue giving Trinidad and Tobago rain-cheques for precipitation.

And while I, too, am conserving water and I, too, am trying to assure that I maintain an adequate supply over the course of the next dry months, I read about some communities that are running sprinklers still. Why? And why not name those communities?

So the word should go out that we should all be conserving water. But of course, it's a matter of grasshoppers and ants.

Damned grasshoppers. Whatever is there to do about them? 

Report them.

Image at top left courtesy Hypergurl, published under this Creative Commons License.